baeuchlein on 21/2/2014 at 18:18

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I have been using NewDark's built-in FM loader, FMSel, for some months now. At first, everything went fine, but after a while, some FM entries began to disappear from FMSel's FM list. Up to now, only FMs whose zip file names are long enough for FMSel to truncate them for internal use (such as "48HC_Secret_of_the_Keepers_flag", which is shortened to "48HC_Secret_of_the_Keepers_fla" in fmsel.ini) have suffered from this.

Usually, a FM may vanish from the list if I start NewDark (v1.21), which automatically starts FMSel (by command-line switch). It does not happen every time I start FMSel, but if I use FMSel for about two or three weeks, missions begin to disappear. Whether it is a totally random thing or whether it just takes some time for the vanishing to occur, I can't say.

Once a mission has vanished from the list, it's entry in fmsel.ini is still present. The mission folder in FMs as well as saved games and the mission zip file remain where they are as well. I could not see anything special about the entry in fmsel.ini when I once looked into it. Deleting the entry (and possible duplicate entries) made the mission re-appear in the list, but usually, it vanished again once I started FMSel again. Deleting fmsel.ini and letting FMSel create it anew did not help either; after some days, entries vanished from the list once again.

A fm.ini file in the mission archive, providing a "nice name" for the mission, did not prevent missions from disappearing.

Deinstalling/uninstaling the game, deleting any remaining directories (folders), restoring Windows from a backup and then re-installing NewDark again did not really work. One or two weeks later, FMs began to vanish from the list again.

So far, I have noticed the problem only on a machine running Vista (32 bit), with a Thief v1.18 patched to NewDark v1.21 with TafferPatcher v2.12. The same setup on a notebook with Win7 x64 did not give me trouble so far, but I usually don't play FMs on that machine. Maybe it would happen there as well if I used the notebook more often for NewDark.

The game is not loacted in any of the special folders (C:\Program Files and the like) which are known to give trouble especially with Vista.

Did anyone notice strangely vanishing missions from his/her FMSel list as well, or is it just my machine getting Alzheimer's disease?:p

Nameless Voice on 22/2/2014 at 16:36

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You might be running into the filesize limit of ini files. IIRC they are limited to 64k.
Unsure if this limitation was lifted in newer versions of Windows.

baeuchlein on 23/2/2014 at 00:07

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No. I deleted it some time ago, half by accident. If it happens again, I'll try to be more clever.:p





I don't think this is the problem here. Currently, my fmsel.ini is about 12K in size, and at the time when something went wrong with it, it may have been two or three times that size, but certainly not more. That's still far from 64K.

Furthermore, I have now inflated fmsel.ini to 207K by adding a very long "Descr=..." entry for one FM, then played two other missions and afterwards unistalled them again. FMSel worked without any trouble. When I played the mission witrh the very long "Descr=..." entry and uninstalled it, the "Descr=..." line was shortened, but everything else remained untouched. fmsel.ini went back to about 14K in size. Still no problems with playing FMs afterwards.

FMSel's shortening of the "Descr=..." line might be completely normal, since FMSel's built-in description editor would usually stop you from entering more than 1500 characters (about 1,5K). I circumvented that by editing fmsel.ini directly, but when FMSel saw my misdeeds, it obviously corrected them.

So much for the file size at the moment.



No, I didn't.;) I mentioned a long name for the zip file.

The folder name for T2 NewDark missions is e:\T2_NewDark_Levels in my case, which should not be a problem for FMSel. The appropriate line in fmsel.ini reads: "ArchiveRoot=E:\T2_NewDark_Levels".

Concerning the zip file names, once it's about 30 characters long, FMSel cuts it short in its entry in fmsel.ini. If there are duplicates, FMSel adds numbers in brackets, but even that does not seem to be a problem. And obviously, even a complete file name with path and drive should stay far below anything close to 256 characters.

Two examples for entries in fmsel.ini with shortened file names:

[FM=48HC_Secret_of_the_Keepers_dem]
Archive=48HC_Secret of the Keepers demo.zip
Flags=1
ReleaseDate=5208FE94

[FM=48HC_Secret_of_the_Keepers_fla]
Archive=48HC_Secret_of_the_Keepers_flag.zip
Flags=1
ReleaseDate=5208FE96

As you can see, every character after the 30th is cut off for internal use by FMSel. However, that does not appear to be the problem, since most missions with such entries still worked. Only a few suddenly disappeared from the list, and they only did so after some time. Before that, there was no problem with them.

Both missions in the above examples, however, have not been played by me so far. No idea whether these two would eventually vanish or not.

baeuchlein on 24/2/2014 at 00:35

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Alright, problem solved. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

The FMSel installation on my Vista machine was configured not to show missions which had already been completed, while the Win7 machine was configured to show missions regardless of whether they were completed or not. So, missions which I marked as "completed" mysteriously "vanished" from the Vista machine. Long zip file names had nothing to do with it, that was just a coincidence.

The only little piece of mystery remaining is why the FMSel on Vista was configured differently than the one on Win7. I have installed both Thief installations from the same game disc and then patched it with the same TafferPatcher. Somehow, the Vista installation has other defaults as the Win7 one, apparently, for I have reinstalled both machines from scratch some time ago, and the different defaults were present before and after reinstalling all that stuff.

Weird.:weird: But at least it's not a bug.:sweat:

Oh, and concerning dethtolls question... well, it was really simple. After noticing that some keys on the keyboard were especially sticky and covered with some jelly-like white substance, we tried some combinations of the sticky keys, and suddenly we found a matching directory name with all that stuff inside. We copied it immediately.:cheeky:

And next time YOU clean that keyboard, you hear me?:ebil: